Getting Started With Marketing Your Book

If you are building a writing career and are looking to do this for a living – book marketing is an iterative, long term process! As much as we’d like to do things once and be done, things change – especially in the Internet world. As marketers, we need to go where the readers are!

Get my Free Guide to Book Marketing if you haven’t already – you can sign up here.

Set up a website. It’s your main hub and most people will come back to it sooner or later. Note: I use Dreamhost (for private registrations and hosting) and WordPress sites because you don’t need to know how to write code and can make some amazing, beautiful pages without hiring a designer. Dreamhost has a 1 click install for WordPress making it very easy to set up Note: this site and my wife’s writer site are both wordpress hosted on Dreamhost. Confused about the difference between WordPress and WordPress.com – check out this video: Should I use WordPress to Host my Author Site?

Newsletter If you have multiple books/plan to have multiple books and are building a brand – Add an newsletter. Dreamhost has a service included with their hosting and Aweber is also very good. If you are consolidating your newsletter from somewhere else, I found Mailchimp to be the easiest to import subscribers without losing anyone. Mailchimp is also free up to 2000 subscribers, so a great, inexpensive way to get started. A newsletter can be a huge source of traffic and will help you with repeat purchases over time.

Aweber is the easiest to use provider on the market, but they charge around $20 a month even for a smaller newsletter list

Get accounts for Twitter and Start building it. It takes very little to get going on Twitter, I got 2000 followers in 30 days… As an author, you can quickly build an audience on twitter and should start doing this as soon as you can. In a few months, you can be connected to a good number of readers 🙂

Create a Facebook Fan Page. You can create a Facebook Fan page here.It it separate from your profile, and is a place where fans can connect with you directly and “like” your author page.